The Iron Castle

by Angus Donald

  ‘Certainly, certainly. I found it open when I came here half an hour ago and left it so because it can become so stuffy in here of an evening. But, of course, I will keep it closed and conserve our precious candles too, in a little while – when I have finished my prayers. God be with you, Sir Alan.’

  I left the good priest to his prayers.

  There was no sign of Robin in the tower and so I sat down with Kit to share a dry crust of bread and a rind of hard cheese, washed down with cold well water, which we called our supper. I understood why Kit’s chief aspiration was to eat when this affair was over. He was painfully thin. It seemed to me a particularly cruel blow that a young man such as he, in the prime of his youth – at a time when he should be quaffing ale with his fellows in the local tavern and stepping out with the girls of the village on moonlit nights – should be stuck in this bare fortress with a growling belly. We chatted a little then, to pass the time, about his ambition to be a knight and what might be expected of him if he were ever to attain that honour. One thing he said that night touched me and has stayed with me evermore. We were discussing how to command the loyalty of men and I was using the fighting spirit of the Wolves as an example, and Kit said, ‘But, of course, all the men would follow the Earl – and you too, Sir Alan – to the very mouth of Hell; they’d even follow you down in there, sir, if you asked it of them. So would I.’

  At about midnight we went up together to check the sentries. They were awake but grumbled a little about the cold, and I promised to see about finding a brazier and some firewood for them. I looked down on the walls of the outer bailey and saw a goodly number of French men-at-arms moving about quietly on the ramparts and wondered if they were undergoing some sort of reorganisation of their watches. It seemed a strange time to be attempting this. Then I looked down to my left and felt a sharp stab of annoyance. I could see an oblong of light illuminating the chalk of the ditch beyond the latrine. Damn the man, I thought, Father de la Motte has opened the chapel window again and has recklessly left candles burning in his House of God.

  I left Kit on the roof of the tower and trotted down the spiral staircase, then crossed the few yards to the steps to the chapel, trying to think of a suitable way to rebuke a holy man who was also my superior in rank. I pushed open the door …

  There were three men-at-arms in the chapel that I had never seen before in my life, and a fourth was in the very act of climbing in through the window.

  The French were inside the middle bailey.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  I ripped Fidelity from its scabbard and rushed at the nearest French man-at-arms. My sword swooped down at his neck, but he was well trained and his vertical block was in place in plenty of time. Our blades rang out like Christmas bells. I bounced away from the blow, lunged at the second man to his left, plunging Fidelity into his upper right thigh, twisted, ripped my sword free of his flesh, turned and chopped again at the first man’s waist. Once again my strike was blocked. The man just then coming through the window, his legs either side of the sill, shouted in French, ‘Kill him, Bogis, kill the dog! And quickly.’

  And this fellow, Bogis, did his very best to do just that. He came at me, step and lunge, step and lunge, driving me back across the chapel. Another fellow in a black hood ran in from the side, swinging a long axe at my head. I dodged the blow, swung Fidelity when he was off-balance and half-severed his neck, but that Bogis fellow was on me again like a lightning bolt, his blade flicking out towards my face. I ducked and I swear the blade parted my hairs. But, worse, more men were tumbling over the window sill and into the room – six unhurt Frenchmen, now seven, eight, and one of them was carrying a crossbow. I heard the door to the chapel opening behind me and Kit’s voice calling my name.

  I blocked another snake-fast cut from Bogis, sent him reeling back with a double feint at his eyes, then groin. I shouted, ‘Kit, sound the alarm. Go. Now. Wake the Wolves!’

  The man with the crossbow had spanned it, loaded a black bolt and was lifting it towards me.

  Kit said, ‘But, sir, you need me…’ I heard the scrape of his sword coming out of its scabbard.

  ‘Go, Kit, go for help or we are all lost.’ I was screaming at my squire. I blocked a roundhouse swing from Bogis, punched him hard in the gut with my empty left fist. Beyond him I saw the man with the crossbow had it pointed at my face, the fellow’s hand squeezing the lever to loose. I dropped to the floor.

  A twang. A coughing cry. I twisted and saw with horror that the bolt had punched straight into Kit’s throat. The black shaft was protruding from just below his Adam’s apple. His eyes were huge with shock. Bright blood began to pump from a severed artery. I leaped up. I looked back – there were ten French men-at-arms in the chapel by now, three of them advancing on me in unison with swords in their hands and hatred in their hearts.

  I ran.

  I have pondered my decision long and hard since then; I have examined my feelings that night in the closest detail. And I swear to you it was not cowardice that caused me to flee the chapel. Even Robin agreed with me when I spoke to him about it later. No other decision could be taken. I had to raise the alarm, I had to, or the entire French army might have come in through that open window. Could I have fought and killed all those French men-at-arms by myself? And killed any more who might have come through the window while I fought? No. Out of the question. To attempt it would have been to jeopardise the whole castle.

  I did the right thing, everybody tells me so. Yet it is painful to remember that I ran from that fight. There were armed enemies to my front and I turned and ran. Well, you shall judge my actions when I reveal what happened next. Leaving Kit coughing out his life’s blood by the door, I sprinted from the chapel and down the steps to the courtyard and began sounding the alarm.

  I ran into the south tower, shouting, ‘To arms!’ Banging metal pots together, kicking sleeping Wolves out of blankets.

  Robin emerged from his chamber, rubbing his eyes, half-dressed but with a sword in his hand.

  ‘The French have got into the chapel,’ I said tersely. ‘And Kit is in there – gravely wounded.’

  Robin said merely, ‘Come on, then.’

  And, with a dozen Wolves at our back, we left the tower.

  The cries of alarm were by now echoing all around the middle bailey. Robin and I charged up the chapel steps and barged through the door, swords drawn – to find the small space quite empty, save for a white-faced Frenchman seated by the wall in a puddle of red, his eyes wide open. And my poor brave Kit, quite dead, curled by the door, his bloody hands wrapped around the shaft in his neck. The candles blazed. The window still yawned. I took a dozen strides over to it, looked briefly out at the empty ditch and slammed it and bolted it with the locking bar.

  Robin said, ‘The drawbridge.’

  Dread and sorrow in equal parts welled up inside me. We ran from that place, down the steps, looking up to the battlements and sure enough men were struggling and dying in the guardhouse by the drawbridge. Terrible screams echoed around the courtyard. The red glow of flames was coming from within the stone shelter where the men had been quietly playing knuckle-bones a few hours beforehand. We charged up the stone steps and piled into the rearmost French men-at-arms. Robin, slightly ahead of me, cut down one from behind with a double-handed diagonal slice to the root of his neck. As he paused to free his blade from deep in the man’s lungs, I slipped past him and engaged a pair of swordsmen who stopped, turned and stood shoulder to shoulder blocking my path along the battlements. Beyond these two I could see the slumped body of Simon who had been on sentry duty and, much worse, the black drawbridge lowering jerkily, down and down.

  I opened the guts of one of the men facing me, and Robin, lunging over my shoulder, sank his bloody blade into the other man’s eye. They both went down, crying out to God, but three more men were behind them, and more behind those, and my head was suddenly filled with a terrible roaring noise, the sound of scores of men shouting for victory. I cou
ld see a mass of enemy gathered across the open space on the walls of the outer bailey, steel glinting in the light of their many torches. A crossbow bolt clattered off the parapet an inch from my shoulder. An instant later the drawbridge banged down on the other side and, with a huge shout, they poured like a black flood across the link between us. I took a step forward, my instinct being to try to stem the tide of men, but I felt Robin’s hand on my shoulder and his quiet voice saying, ‘No, Alan, no. We are done here. We must get to the inner bailey. Back, all of you, back. Back to the inner bailey.’

  And for the second time that night, I ran.

  Robin and most of the Wolves made it safely out of the middle bailey and across the stone bridge into the inner part of the castle before we closed the wooden gates and the iron portcullis in the faces of the victorious French. But a goodly number of our men died that night as some five hundred French men-at-arms poured across the drawbridge and flooded the courtyard of the middle bailey. Those who had not awakened swiftly enough were slaughtered in their blankets; those who did not speedily abandon their posts and rush to the safety of the inner bailey were cut down in the confusion of fire and terror that bloody night.

  I wept for Kit. I knew I had failed him as his lord and his comrade. He would never be a knight now. He was not, perhaps, the finest squire I had ever had, but he was a good man, a loyal soldier and a true friend. Requiescat in pace.

  I tormented myself with thoughts of what I could have done differently in the chapel and on the battlements. Could I have defeated all those invaders in the chapel and stemmed the tide? I did not believe so – I was weak from months of bad food, and even in my best condition, I would shy away from taking on more than three enemies at once. If I had had the wit to realise earlier that the men were making for the drawbridge, perhaps we might not have wasted valuable time returning to the chapel and we might have stopped them. Perhaps.

  Robin snapped me out of my melancholic state a little before dawn. He came and found me sitting with my back against the wooden wall of the great hall in the inner bailey, my eyes reddened by tears. It was warm and smoky in there, a large fire burning in the hearth in the centre. And, even with half the soldiers manning the walls and watching the French loot the middle bailey, the place was crowded with men, wandering about aimlessly, arguing, assigning blame, cursing the failure of the sentries to stem the attack across the drawbridge. I was too tired to join in the debate. My lord came across to me, folded his cloak and sat down on it on the rush-strewn floor. For the next half an hour he listened patiently to a list of my failures, to my bitter self-recriminations, nodding but making no comment.

  Then he said, ‘What’s done is done, Alan. Even if we might have done things differently, we did not, and fretting about it will not change a thing. We’ve lost the middle bailey, we’ve lost many good men, and here we are. There is nothing more to say on the matter.’

  He was right, of course, but I could not leave it be. I told him about the inviting open window and the unguarded candle-bright chapel, about telling Father de la Motte to keep the shutters and to extinguish the lights. I also told him about the strange troop movements I had seen at midnight on the walls of the outer bailey.

  ‘This was no chance break-in,’ I said. ‘They knew they could get into the middle bailey through that very window, and they sent a dozen men to accomplish that and to capture the drawbridge gatehouse. And they had the men ready to charge across the lowered drawbridge and exploit our weakness.’

  ‘Are you still talking about a traitor within our walls?’ asked Robin.

  I nodded. ‘Somebody opened that window and let the French in. They clearly knew beforehand the window would be opened that night.’

  ‘Do you think it is de la Motte?’

  I shrugged. ‘Yes, perhaps, or some other knight or nobleman. I don’t know. But I swear to you, Robin, I shall find out.’

  ‘Do you think it is me?’ Robin said softly, but there was a whiff of menace in his question. ‘Do you think I am a traitor?’

  I said nothing. I wanted to say that I hoped with all my heart that it was not him, for whoever the traitor was, he had killed Kit – and I was not sure I would ever forgive that. So I said nothing.

  Robin sighed. ‘Some men would be furious at your silent accusation,’ he said. ‘But not I. We have known each other a long time, Alan, a long, long time – and perhaps I have not always revealed my stratagems fully to you, as I should have. Perhaps this has, on occasion, caused some difficulties between us. So I will reveal the truth to you now, for the sake of our long friendship.’

  I held my breath. Please God, sweet merciful God, I beg you: do not let Robin be the traitor.

  ‘Some months ago, eight months to be exact, King Philip approached me through one of his agents while I was at Rouen with John. He offered me almost half of Normandy – twenty-odd castles and the lands to go with them, a second earldom, in effect, wealth beyond my most extravagant dreams. All I need do was serve Philip secretly while remaining for a time at John’s side.’

  I could not breathe. I could not even look at Robin. For I knew Philip had offered him all he had ever wanted.

  Robin said nothing for a few moments. He was looking at the nails of his left hand, dirty, ragged, the fingers thin and bony from our poor diet, the skin loose. He seemed fascinated by the sight.

  ‘You must know, Alan, that I do not truly love King John. He is a cruel, cringing, pathetic excuse for a man – and a worse King. He is a disaster as a military leader; and as a lord of lords he is no more than a bad jest.’

  I began to move away from Robin; I knew what was coming next and I did not think I could sit still and hear him try to make me understand his decision to sell his loyalty like a bauble to the highest bidder. I would close my ears to him.

  ‘But the thing is, Alan, I swore an oath to King John. I swore a sacred oath to serve him faithfully, without deceit, for the whole of my life. And when Philip offered me all the riches of the earth, I discovered something odd about myself. Ten years ago I would have taken his offer. Bitten his hand off, probably. But that day eight months ago in Rouen, on that day I found I loved my own honour more than the promise of all the castles of Normandy and all the rich lands the earth has to offer. I turned him down flat.’

  I gaped at Robin, speechless.

  ‘I don’t want to live in Normandy under a French King. I want to live in Yorkshire, at Kirkton, if you want me to be precise, with Marie-Anne and the boys; I want to live on my lands, lands I have earned by loyal service to the crown, and I want to raise my sons as Englishmen. And I want to be able to look Hugh and Miles in the eye and tell them about honour, and explain to them that while wealth and lands are very fine, a man’s honour is the most important of his possessions. To prove that point, I must endure this siege. I must be getting old and stupid but, you see, Alan, I am not your traitor.’

  My throat was clogged, my eyes were burning with unshed tears. I could feel my heart beating like a tambour. I looked into Robin’s eyes and said just this to him, ‘If you are lying to me on this matter, my lord, I will most certainly kill you. I swear it.’

  Robin looked at me silently and nodded.

  For a long time we sat there in silence. Then Robin said, ‘I think we should perhaps not mention the presence of a traitor to anyone just yet. Though I have no doubts now that one is among us. If Philip were prepared to offer me such a rich prize to serve him, I am sure he would have been able to find someone else among our company prepared to sell their honour for silver.’

  ‘Should we not speak to de Lacy about it?’ I said.

  ‘Sir Roger may be the traitor. His fine talk about being dragged from the castle by his heels could be a bluff. He has no lands on this side of the channel – perhaps he would be tempted by the offer of a rich Norman fiefdom.’

  ‘I do not think so,’ I said. It felt strange to be contradicting my lord. But my threat to kill him had subtly changed things between us. I was still his man,
but the gulf in status between us had narrowed. We were not equals, by any means, but I was no longer a callow boy whose thoughts and actions could so easily be manipulated by his lord.

  ‘I do not think it could be de Lacy,’ I repeated. ‘If he wished to serve Philip, he had only to surrender, to open the gates and castle to him and that, I believe, he is firmly resolved not to do. You are right in that he has no lands here in Normandy – but that means his loyalties lie in England. The fortunes of John are his fortunes. I think the King appointed him castellan because he knows can trust him to the end.’

  ‘You may have a point, Alan. Yes, I think you may be right. I will speak to de Lacy about the matter this morning.’

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  We still held the Iron Castle and, with some two hundred men-at-arms inside the inner bailey, it was almost as crowded as it had been when the Useless Mouths were among us – God rest their poor souls. The food was nearly all gone: we existed on one cup of ‘unnameable soup’ a day, as we called it, thickened with a few oats or a spoonful of flour. Some of the Wolves contrived to use slingshots to bring down birds – and it became a kind of game, with folk wagering whether the shot would strike the bird (it most often did, for several of the Wolves were experts in this method of killing) and whether it would fall within our reach. When a bird fell into the French-controlled middle bailey, there was a general lamentation; jubilation when it fell into our part of the castle. The stone-killed birds were all surrendered to Sir Benedict Malet – who had become responsible for boiling the daily soup. But there were other more unsavoury elements in the broth: rats, mice, insects, worms, beetles; even some kinds of edible moss, fungus and grasses were boiled up for the little nourishment they could provide. Anything and everything went into that vile soup – which was why it never earned a name. I didn’t like to enquire about its contents, I just gulped it down hot and wished there were more to be had.